Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory

Edited by Linda S. Cordell and George J. Gumerman

Publication Year: 2006

Emerging from a School of American Research, this work reviews the general status of archaeological knowledge in 9 key regions of the Southwest to examine broader questions of cultural development, which affected the Southwest as a whole, and to consider an overall conceptual model of the prehistoric Southwest after the advent of sedentism.

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Contributors

Foreword

The American Southwest has been the subject of a vast amount of archaeo logical research in the past century. Through a combination of excellent preservation, exceptional chronological control, and the presence of a variety of vigorous, contemporary native cultures, which have resided in the area since the prehistoric period, the Southwest has offered an unparalleled ...

Preface to the 2006 Edition

First published in 1989, this book grew out of an advanced seminar held at the School of American Research in Santa Fe in 1983. The seminar, "Dynamics of Southwestern Prehistory," was planned and convened by Douglas W. Schwartz, then President of the school. As he notes in the foreword to this volume, Schwartz carefully selected participants for their ...

Preface

An effective conference uses the data and concepts that have been collected and generated in order to assess the current state of the discipline, and then uses that platform to address current concerns in new ways. The conference that was the genesis of this volume was proposed because Southwest archaeology is in a period of rapid change, both in terms of the amount and kinds ...

1. Cultural Interaction in the Prehistoric Southwest

The North American Southwest extends from southeastern Utah and south western Colorado into Chihuahua and Sonora, and from central New Mexico to the Grand Canyon and the lower Colorado River (Fig. 1). As delineated, this geographically heterogeneous area is united by an arid to semiarid climate, a condition that has had major impact on cultural manifestations. The ...

2. The Hohokam: 1,000 Years of Prehistory in the Sonoran Desert

The Hohokam are the prehistoric desert farmers in central and southern Arizona below the Mogollon Rim, from the Dragoon Mountains on the east to the Growler Mountains on the west (Fig. 3). Discounting any portion of adjacent Mexico that might exhibit cultural similarities, these boundaries involve a territory of nearly 45,000 square miles or an area almost the size of ...

3. A Grasshopper Perspective on the Mogollon of the Arizona Mountains

The idea of a Mogollon people living in the mountains and adjacent deserts of Arizona and New Mexico began in controversy and continued in debate for over twenty years (Reid 1986). When proposed by Emil Haury in 1936, most southwestern archaeologists were reticent to accept the Mogollon as distinct from the neighboring Anasazi and Hohokam. Archaeologists work ...

4. Prehistoric Cooperation and Competition in the Western Anasazi Area

Archaeologists' perception of the character of Anasazi society has changed dramatically in the last five years. Oddly, this is not so much in response to new data, although there are a great deal of those, as it is to new ways of The 1960s and early 1970s in Anasazi archaeology were devoted to the development of local sequences. This was in large part a result of increasing ...

5. Northern San Juan Prehistory

Although the Mesa Verde has often been viewed as the nucleus of the northernmost prehistoric Puebloan occupation, it more accurately represents one subdivision within the Northern San Juan Region. Such a cultural region occupies the drainages of the northern tributaries of the San Juan River from Comb Ridge in southeastern Utah to the upper San Juan Yalley ...

6. Cultural Dynamics in the Southern Mogollon Area

The Mogollon cultural area is one of the three generally recognized major traditions in the Southwest. The area can be conveniently subdivided into a northern or mountain Mogollon, and a southern, valley or desert Mogollon. These divisions represent not only topographic variability but important southwestern New Mexico, the San Simon branch in southeastern Arizona, ...

7. Chaco Canyon—San Juan Basin

This paper was written in the summer of 1983 in preparation for the SAR conference that fall. At that time, I was director of the Chaco Project, the National Park Service's long-term research project in Chaco Canyon, which then employed eight archaeologists involved in writing the results of the research. Since that summer, a great number of changes have taken place ...

8. The Sinagua and Their Relations

This chapter is divided into four major sections. In the first two, I identify the spatial and temporal frameworks that I will use in interpreting the prehis tory of the Sinagua area. In the third, I describe patterns of sodocultural change that occurred in the Sinagua area beginning at about A.D. 700. In the final section I discuss causes of these events, relying on a recent paper by ...

9. Northern and Central Rio Grande

The geographical area included in this paper comprises the Rio Grande Valley and surrounding mountains, from the Colorado State line in the north to Elephant Butte in the south. The lower portions of Rio Grande tributaries and portions of the Upper Cimarron and Upper Pecos River Valleys are also included within this region (Fig. 26). The archaeological infor ...

10. Cibola: Shifting Cultural Boundaries

The Cibola area of east central New Mexico and west central Arizona witnessed a more complex series of events than most of the rest of the South west. In particular, these events included considerable changes in cultural relationships over time. These relationships changed so much that it is hard to define a Cibola area over time. Moreover, Cibola represents one of the ...

11. Dynamics of Southwestern Prehistory: Far Outside—Looking In

Imperial Sasanian resistance in Khuzistan (southwestern Iran) to the ad vance of Arab forces of the Caliphate of 'Umar ibn al-Khattab collapsed in A.D. 642 with the fall of Susa and Jundishapur. Five millennia of pre-Islamic political complexity had come to an end. To the contemporary Archaic populations of the American Southwest, Khuzistan might as well have been ...

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